- Graham breaks with brother on nuking filibuster
Source: The Hill
“Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) on Monday broke with her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), over abolishing the filibuster three weeks after stepping in to finish the rest of his term. … ]This is where I differ from my brother, getting rid of the filibuster to get this done. Because eventually the Democrats are going to get rid of it anyway,’ she added, in reference to how Republicans should handle passing legislation to change voter registration requirements. Earlier this year, Lindsey Graham said lawmakers could consider nuking the filibuster in the future but warned against it in the short term.” (08/04/26)
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6007377-nordone-breaks-lindsey-graham-stance
- Future of Crew Dragon weighs on commercial spaceflight industry
Source: Space News
“While SpaceX says there is a ‘significant’ amount of life left in its fleet of Crew Dragon spacecraft, the company has hedged on how long it will continue flying the spacecraft as it transitions to Starship. The upcoming Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for launch no earlier than Sept. 12, will be the second flight of this Crew Dragon spacecraft, called Grace, the newest of the fleet. Grace made its first flight last summer on the Ax-4 private astronaut mission to the ISS. Crew-13 will be SpaceX’s 18th human spaceflight mission to the ISS …. SpaceX does not plan to build additional Crew Dragon spacecraft beyond the five currently in service. While the spacecraft were originally certified for five missions each, the company has been working with NASA to extend the spacecraft lifetimes to up to 15 missions each.” (08/04/26)
https://spacenews.com/future-of-crew-dragon-weighs-on-commercial-spaceflight-industry/
- Red All Over? It’s Not So Black and White
Source: Garrison Center
by Joel Schlosberg“In the month celebrating 250 years of red, white and blue, Americans were seeing plenty of red — and not just as part of commemorative trifectas or midterm forecast maps.” (08/04/26)
- A Murder Spree Without End
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison“The boat strikes haven’t made a dent in the flow of drugs into this country, nor was there ever any reason to believe that they would. Combating drug trafficking was the official excuse to start the killing, but it was always just an excuse. In the last ten months, the campaign has taken on a life of its own. It makes no difference to the president or Hegseth that the campaign is a failure on its own terms. They are killing these people at least in part to show their contempt for the law and to prove that they won’t be bound by it. They are testing to see how far they can go before they encounter serious opposition. There is no sign that the administration will stop killing civilians at sea unless it is forced to.” (08/04/26)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/a-murder-spree-without-end
- The Constitution’s Forgotten Economic Tradeoffs
Source: The Daily Economy
by Antón Chamberlin“The Articles of Confederation are often remembered as a failure. But their limits on taxing and commercial power offered greater protection for economic freedom than the Constitution that replaced them.” (08/04/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-constitutions-forgotten-economic-tradeoffs/
- Why the Intelligent Forget the Obvious
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie“Economics has a small stock of principles that a first-year student can recite and a Cabinet minister can forget within the hour. Incentives matter; Taxes change behaviour; Prices are signals. These are not obscure theorems. They are closer to proverbs, the kind of thing an intelligent teenager grasps within an afternoon. Yet politicians who could tell you the exact yield on a ten-year gilt will propose a policy that assumes people respond to subsidies but not to taxes, or that a price can be fixed by decree without anyone noticing. The puzzle is not that people are stupid. Despite obvious counter-examples, few politicians are. The puzzle is that intelligence and economic literacy are almost unrelated skills, and the political process actively selects against the second.” (08/04/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/why-the-intelligent-forget-the-obvious
- Trump’s tariffs are his biggest policy failure
Source: The Hill
by Merrill Matthews“After a stinging but widely expected loss at the U.S. Supreme Court, President Trump pressed his enablers to search, once again, for some law he could use to justify imposing new tariff rates on dozens of countries, both friends and foes alike. Yet no Trump policy has been a bigger economic and political failure than his tariffs, alienating other countries, harming U.S. businesses and, most importantly, enraging American voters.” (08/04/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/6006905-us-trade-deficit-tariffs/
- Five Lessons Learned From the Fauci Fiasco
Source: Town Hall
by Stephen Moore“COVID-19 was a traumatic experience for our families, small businesses, schools, and country. Understandably, people don’t like thinking or talking about it. But we must. We now know, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul’s doggedness and Anthony Fauci’s supreme arrogance, which he freely expresses in his diary, that almost every decision made by the medical-industrial complex was exactly the wrong thing to do. Fauci has blown himself up, and almost overnight he has gone from hero to antihero. Politicians and the media didn’t take note of the fact that Fauci had a track record of hysterical and erroneous predictions about viruses before — he was, for example, the public health official peddling the nonsense about heterosexual AIDS. Instead, when Fauci went on TV in front of tens of millions of Americans preaching Armageddon and contradicting everything Trump was saying, he became a saint. No wonder Fauci developed a god complex.” (08/04/26)
- College students aren’t becoming less polarized. They’re becoming less tolerant.
Source: Expression
by Chloe Ratner“The ideological tolerance gap on campus is shrinking, but not because students are becoming more open-minded. Rather, it appears they are becoming less tolerant across the board.” (08/05/26)
https://expression.fire.org/p/college-students-arent-becoming-less
- Don’t Believe Todd Blanche About Trump’s Slush Fund From Hell
Source: The Bulwark
by Philip Rotner“The so-called “anti-weaponization fund” established as part of a purported settlement between President Trump and the IRS isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping. Don’t be fooled by the weasel-worded statements that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on the Department of Justice website and tweeted out late Sunday night. They are clearly intended to give a false impression that a stake has finally been driven into the fund’s heart. It hasn’t. Blanche posted two written statements on Sunday night, one that he calls an ‘order’ and one that he calls an ‘update.’ Let’s look at each of them in turn.” (08/04/26)
- Iran’s war … on its homefront
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff“Ask an Iranian in Tehran these days how the war is going and you might get this response: Which war? The on-again, off-again war on Iran by U.S. President Donald Trump? Or the war inside Iran by a regime whose new fear campaign against its people appears to be backfiring? Since January, when Iran saw the largest unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, executions of political dissenters have surged. In late July, the regime escalated its intimidation tactics by holding the first public executions since 2022 – but not before a large crowd tried to stop the construction of gallows in a public square. Videos on social media show security forces in the central city of Isfahan chasing protesters before two young men were hanged.” (08/03/26)
https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0803/Iran-s-war-on-its-homefront
- Cato Podcast, 08/04/26
Source: Cato Institute
“Iran: Schrodinger’s War.” (08/04/26)
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-podcast/iran-schrodingers-war
- Trump Watch, 08/04/26
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
“Trump’s Tar Baby Is Expanding and Strengthening.” (08/04/26)
- The Bryan Hyde Show, 08/04/26
Source: The Bryan Hyde Show
“Eric Peters from Eric Peters Autos joins me for our weekly debrief. No matter how crazy things may get or how ridiculous the things we’re expected to believe, we always have options.” (08/04/26)